Comment by ccorcos

I love this article and its ideas, but let's talk about where it falls short in reality.

1. CRDTs are a pain, especially rich text. Schema migrations are a pain. And eventually when you have a very successful product, you'll have issues with vector clocks that grow linearly and unbounded with every user who pops by to collaborate. If you're successful enough to have a 2000 person workspace, you won't be able to / want to sync an entire workspace of data in realtime to everyone's local machine, so the whole system devolves into a glorified local cache (nothing wrong with that, but it's not a CRDT and arguably isn't local-first).

2. Freemium SaaS has proven to be the most lucrative business strategy. Users get stuff for free which widens the top of the funnel. Students go into the industry and bring their tools with them, and then you charge enterprises for collaborative workspaces per-seat (I call this the Slack playbook). Given the challenges of CRDTs outlined above, you're making this job really hard.

3. If you're making all of your money on enterprises, they would prefer that a rogue employee can't save all of the company information offline when they leave. That's why you can't export your company Gmail or Notion workspace. Employees will pretty much always be online so local-first isn't really necessary for them, although everyone does want the performance of local-first.

4. There are large swathes of problems that are not suited for local-first -- basically any application that requires transactional writes. You can't enforce simple invariants like "every use must have a unique username". Almost every application has requirements like this unless you specifically design around them. Sometimes, they can't be designed around at all.

At the end of the day, I like to think of choosing local-first through the lens of the "technology budget". If you want to build something local-first, then that's your entire technology budget and then some. Do you want to bet your entire business on that? Or do you want to use tried-and-true tools and spend that technology budget on something else that moves the needle?

Developers love to know how something is built, but users really don't care so long as it works great! Example: Obsidian.md is awesome, and local-first. But it's mostly developers who use it -- everyone else just uses Notion.

I still love Local-First, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a developer honeytrap.